I was reading through the recent articles posted on ReadWriteWeb earlier and saw that TweetMeme has found a way to monetize their site. “Tweetmeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular. Tweetmeme is able to categorize these links into 4 distinct categories, blog, video, image and audio.” Basically it’s a newer way to view and rank posts that happen on Twitter in a centralized manner and organized by categories. The key point though is that they were able to find a way to monetize it.
TweetMeme has added a new area found in the top right entitled Sponsored Tweets. In this area you are able to buy a link to one of your tweets. This isn’t the only advantage though as if the tweet is new it will also be included in the most recently posted stories and be highlighted by the site, a link to the owner’s Twitter account, a post by TweetMeme’s twitter account, and finally added into the site’s RSS feed. On top of this the sponsored link will only last 24 hours allowing a constant flow of fresh possible income for the site. Pricing is still in trial mode though a definitive price should be available within 3 weeks.
It’s a very straightforward advertising model that is able to include Twitter’s own services and the site’s space to “sell” advertising. Twitter applications, while obviously having become a heavier presence in the modern blogging era, have been hard to find ways to monetize that fit with each applications usefulness. TweetMeme has found an excellent way to do this and helps to show exactly how creative sales can be while remaining simple and inline with the purpose of the site.
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